Slanting I, Imagining We by Larissa Lai

Author:Larissa Lai [Lai, Larissa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Published: 2014-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

REMEMBERING THE FUTURE: ASIAN AMERICAN HAUNTINGS

To that end, I would like to close this chapter by discussing an anthology that is aware of what the conventional anthology form does, and attempts to do something else. On the dust jacket of Walter Lew’s Premonitions, Stephen Sumida remarks:

Up to recently, Asian American literary anthologies have served to canonize authors, works, tastes, and ideas. Premonitions is different. From conception to layout, it explodes impulses to map centers and margins of Asian American poetry. Instead Premonitions gives us a brilliant variety of poetry and poets who together show: we are all this and more.

Sumida does not claim that Premonitions works against the more conventional type of anthology like Many-Mouthed Birds. Rather it adds to it, and in doing so produces a more open-ended kind of subjectivity for poets marked “Asian American.”6 It seems important to note, however, that the supplemental quality of this anthology is only possible because conventional anthologies have preceded it.7 Without them, its innovation, however extraordinary, would not be legible.

The two anthologies I have discussed prior to this both take recourse to history in order to produce a very particular kind of present, one that produces a new kind of subject from the spectres and disjunctures of the past, in much the way that Homi Bhabha describes in the introduction to The Location of Culture. There is an ambulant motion to and fro between past and present, in order to make the liberatory subject anew, in the present, a subject fundamentally different from the subject of official, linear, national histories. I wonder what kind of social labour this subject does, once drawn into the folds of the nation-state, that is once it has received a Canada Council grant, been read by the mainstream press, or for that matter, been anthologized. However productive the motion back and forth between disappearance and appearance, between marginalization and self-articulation, the minute marked subject gets the acknowledgement it seeks, it loses its subaltern power.

What is generative about the subjects of Premonitions is that they don’t look to the broken past for reflections of themselves with which to cobble themselves together in the present. Rather, they look to the future: “The premonitions in this book remember the future, augur the past, play the present apart from itself—especially where ‘history’ is too much agreed upon” (Lew 583).

Its project is very different from that of Many-Mouthed Birds. Instead of attempting to fix a history with themes and a cast of characters, a history articulated by “authentic” subjects of that history, it takes on the term “Asian North American” in all its troubled forms—racist, anti-racist, anthropological, authentic, self-identifying—and allows its subjects to draw from the future to ensure that the present is never entirely graspable, but rather caught in an endless play of différance in which the subject cannot be fixed, cannot be read the same way twice, and therefore cannot be commodified.

There is something about seeking a reflection of oneself in the past, however uncannily produced, that remains an exercise of legitimation, that is, asking for entry into the nation-state.

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